Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
and who was normally a most admirable and sensible woman, came to insist
that a ship should be anchored off a huge seaside hotel because she had
a house in the neighborhood.
There were many such instances. One stood out above the others. A
certain seaboard State contained in its Congressional delegation one of
the most influential men in the Senate, and one of the most influential
men in the lower house. These two men had been worse than lukewarm about
building up the navy, and had scoffed at the idea of there ever being
any danger from any foreign power. With the advent of war the feelings
of their constituents, and therefore their own feelings, suffered an
immediate change, and they demanded that a ship be anchored in the
harbor of their city as a protection. Getting no comfort from me, they
went "higher up," and became a kind of permanent committee in attendance
upon the President. They were very influential men in the Houses, with
whom it was important for the Administration to keep on good terms; and,
moreover, they possessed a pertinacity as great as the widow who won her
case from the unjust judge. Finally the President gave in and notified
me to see that a ship was sent to the city in question. I was bound
that, as long as a ship had to be sent, it should not be a ship worth
anything. Accordingly a Civil War Monitor, with one smooth-bore gun,
managed by a crew of about twenty-one naval militia, was sent to the
city in question, under convoy of a tug. It was a hazardous trip for the
unfortunate naval militiamen, but it was safely accomplished; and joy
and peace descended upon the Senator and the Congressman, and upon the
President whom they had jointly harassed. Incidentally, the fact that
the protecting war-vessel would not have been a formidable foe to
any antagonists of much more modern construction than the galleys of
Alcibiades seemed to disturb nobody.
This was one side of the picture. The other side was that the crisis at
once brought to the front any amount of latent fighting strength. There
were plenty of Congressmen who showed cool-headed wisdom and resolution.
The plain people, the men and women back of the persons who lost their
heads, set seriously to work to see that we did whatever was necessary,
and made the job a thorough one. The young men swarmed to enlist. In
time of peace it had been difficult to fill the scanty regular army and
navy, and there were innumerable desertions; now the ships and regiments
were over-enlisted, and so many deserters returned in order to fight
that it became difficult to decide what to do with them. England, and
to a less degree Japan, were friendly. The great powers of Continental
Europe were all unfriendly. They jeered at our ships and men, and with
fatuous partisanship insisted that the Spaniards would prove too much
for our "mercenaries" because we were a commercial people of low ideals
who could not fight, while the men whom we attempted to hire for that
purpose were certain to run on the day of battle.
Among my friends was the then Army Surgeon Leonard Wood. He was a
surgeon. Not having an income, he had to earn his own living. He had
gone through the Harvard Medical School, and had then joined the army
in the Southwest as a contract doctor. He had every physical, moral,
and mental quality which fitted him for a soldier's life and for
the exercise of command. In the inconceivably wearing and harassing
campaigns against the Apaches he had served nominally as a surgeon,
really in command of troops, on more than one expedition. He was as
anxious as I was that if there were war we should both have our part in
it. I had always felt that if there were a serious war I wished to be in
a position to explain to my children why I did take part in it, and not
why I did not take part in it. Moreover, I had very deeply felt that it
was our duty to free Cuba, and I had publicly expressed this feeling;
and when a man takes such a position, he ought to be willing to make his
words good by his deeds unless there is some very strong reason to the
contrary. He should pay with his body.
As soon as war was upon us, Wood and I began to try for a chance to
go to the front. Congress had authorized the raising of three National
Volunteer Cavalry regiments, wholly apart from the State contingents.
Secretary Alger of the War Department was fond of me personally, and
Wood was his family doctor. Alger had been a gallant soldier in the
Civil War, and was almost the only member of the Administration who felt
all along that we would have to go to war with Spain over Cuba. He liked
my attitude in the matter, and because of his remembrance of his
own experiences he sympathized with my desire to go to the front.
Accordingly he offered me the command of one of the regiments. I told
him that after six weeks' service in the field I would feel competent to
handle the regiment, but that I would not know how to equip it or how
to get it into the first action; but that Wood was entirely competent
at once to take command, and that if he would make Wood colonel I would
accept the lieutenant-colonelcy. General Alger thought this an act of
foolish self-abnegation on my part--instead of its being, what it
was, the wisest act I could have performed. He told me to accept the
colonelcy, and that he would make Wood lieutenant-colonel, and that Wood
would do the work anyway; but I answered that I did not wish to rise on
any man's shoulders; that I hoped to be given every chance that my deeds
and abilities warranted; but that I did not wish what I did not earn,
and that above all I did not wish to hold any position where any one
else did the work. He laughed at me a little and said I was foolish, but
I do not think he really minded, and he promised to do as I wished. True
to his word, he secured the appointment of Wood as colonel and of myself
as lieutenant-colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry. This
was soon nicknamed, both by the public and by the rest of the army,
the Rough Riders, doubtless because the bulk of the men were from the
Southwestern ranch country and were skilled in the wild horsemanship of
the great plains.
Wood instantly began the work of raising the regiment. He first
assembled several old non-commissioned officers of experience, put them
in office, and gave them blanks for requisitions for the full equipment
of a cavalry regiment. He selected San Antonio as the gathering-place,
as it was in a good horse country, near the Gulf from some port on which
we would have to embark, and near an old arsenal and an old army
post from which we got a good deal of stuff--some of it practically
condemned, but which we found serviceable at a pinch, and much better
than nothing. He organized a horse board in Texas, and began purchasing
all horses that were not too big and were sound. A day or two after he
was commissioned he wrote out in the office of the Secretary of War,
under his authority, telegrams to the Governors of Arizona, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, and Indian Territory, in substance as follows:
The President desires to raise --- volunteers in your Territory to form
part of a regiment of mounted riflemen to be commanded by Leonard Wood,
Colonel; Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant-Colonel. He desires that the men
selected should be young, sound, good shots and good riders, and that
you expedite by all means in your power the enrollment of these men.
(Signed) R. A. ALGER, Secretary of War.
As soon as he had attended to a few more odds and ends he left
Washington, and the day after his arrival in San Antonio the troops
began to arrive.
For several weeks before I joined the regiment, to which Wood went ahead
of me, I continued as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, trying to
get some coherence of plan between the War Department and the Navy
Department; and also being used by Wood to finish getting the equipment
for the regiment. As regards finding out what the plans of the War
Department were, the task was simple. They had no plans. Even during the
final months before the outbreak of hostilities very little was done in
the way of efficient preparation. On one occasion, when every one knew
that the declaration of war was sure to come in a few days, I went on
military business to the office of one of the highest line generals of
the army, a man who at that moment ought to have been working eighteen
hours out of the twenty-four on the vital problems ahead of him. What he
was actually doing was trying on a new type of smart-looking uniform
on certain enlisted men; and he called me in to ask my advice as to the
position of the pockets in the blouse, with a view to making it look
attractive. An aide of this general--funnily enough a good fighting man
in actual service--when I consulted him as to what my uniform for the
campaign should be, laid special stress upon my purchasing a pair of
black top boots for full dress, explaining that they were very effective
on hotel piazzas and in parlors. I did not intend to be in any hotel
if it could possibly be avoided; and as things turned out, I had no
full-dress uniform, nothing but my service uniform, during my brief
experience in the army.
I suppose that war always does bring out what is highest and lowest in
human nature. The contractors who furnish poor materials to the army or
the navy in time of war stand on a level of infamy only one degree above
that of the participants in the white slave traffic themselves. But
there is conduct far short of this which yet seems inexplicable to any
man who has in him any spirit of disinterested patriotism combined
with any power of imagination. Respectable men, who I suppose lack the
imagination thoroughly to realize what they are doing, try to make money
out of the Nation's necessities in war at the very time that other men
are making every sacrifice, financial and personal, for the cause. In
the closing weeks of my service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy we
were collecting ships for auxiliary purposes. Some men, at cost to their
own purses, helped us freely and with efficiency; others treated the
affair as an ordinary business transaction; and yet others endeavored,
at some given crisis when our need was great, to sell us inferior
vessels at exorbitant prices, and used every pressure, through Senators
and Congressmen, to accomplish their ends. In one or two cases they did
accomplish them too, until we got a really first-class board established
to superintend such purchases. A more curious experience was in
connection with the point chosen for the starting of the expedition
against Cuba. I had not supposed that any human being could consider
this matter save from the standpoint of military need. But one morning
a very wealthy and influential man, a respectable and upright man
according to his own lights, called on me to protest against our choice
of Tampa, and to put in a plea for a certain other port, on the ground
that his railroad was entitled to its share of the profit for hauling
the army and equipment! I happened to know that at this time this
very man had kinsfolk with the army, who served gallantly, and the
circumstances of his coming to me were such as to show that he was not
acting secretly, and had no idea that there was anything out of the way
in his proposal. I think the facts were merely that he had been trained
to regard business as the sole object in life, and that he lacked the
imagination to enable him to understand the real nature of the request
that he was making; and, moreover, he had good reason to believe that
one of his business competitors had been unduly favored.
The War Department was in far worse shape than the Navy Department. The
young officers turned out from West Point are precisely as good as the